An interview with our partners in Bulgaria

Recently our partners in Bulgaria sat down to answer some questions about the ministry they are doing and how teams with Servant Life can come serve on short-term trips! Check out this interview and the video below about the ministry going on in Bulgaria!

Tell us about the work you are doing in Bulgaria.

Ben: We serve mainly with the Roma people, who are the largest minority in Europe. The Roma people are often pushed to the margin of society due to racial division. We serve within the Roma villages but also are trying to bridge the gap between Bulgarians and Romas with the Gospel. 

What is some of the ministry you are doing to make this happen?

Dinko: For over 20 years, we have been working among the Roma people and have come to the conclusion that in order to be most productive, we have to combine the message of Christ with humanitarian aid and with education. Some of the things that we do is try to provide Christian communities with church buildings or building churches and training ministers in order to put someone in the pulpit to minister. A very important aspect of our ministry is to minister to the little children because we are trying to break the cycle of poverty that has caused them to think that they are worthless and cannot receive education. We help them (the children) go to school and the process of being educated. Once they are educated, the society that previously segregated them is now accepting them as equals.

Ben: The Esther Project began many years ago with offering supplementary education to children in the Roma villages who had recently gotten into the public schools, but realized they were behind because of education. So you went through the material and built a new education which kept them active after school, to keep them out of trouble, and also offer to catch them up and care for their physical needs. Years after that curriculum, now it has multiplied and you are discipling other pastors, ministers, friends, and people to do the same and it has relocated to Stara Zagora. 

Dinko: We have relocated to Stara Zagora because it is a central city in the country and it is easier for us to train the couples who are willing to replicate this model of ministry to their children in their environment. Right now our main focus is to mentor and train the ministers who are going to be teaching and mentoring to children. On top of that, we continue on a daily basis to teach online to children who are a little more advanced, so the local leaders cannot really help them with their education. We are here to push them forward to give them the opportunity to apply for colleges.

When a Servant Life short-term team comes and serves in Bulgaria, how are they serving to help your ministry beyond that week?

Dinko: It really impacts and benefits the presence of the teams because when they come and we enter those communities together, they (the Roma people) see the unity of the church and feel they are accepted not only by Bulgarians as ministers, but they see they are accepted and loved by the international body of Christ. We go and preach the Gospel, minister to them in prayers, go into their houses, and distribute food that is purchased by you guys (Servant Life Teams). This has a tremendous effect on the whole community, not only the Christians but the whole community because they witness the love of God. A lot of these individuals, when they see what is happening, come to church and hear about Jesus

Ben: One of the big things we see there as well is when they (Servant Life teams) come, a lot of these people feel unseen and pushed away. A lot of times we can take these same feelings and put them on God, so we are reminding people that they are loved, that they are seen, that they are not forgotten. It also puts fuel on the fire for the ministries that happen year-round.

Dinko: In the Roma community, women and children are considered not to be human beings. We go there and pray together for them and for the first time they feel this personal touch of another human being who would say their names and pray for them individually, this is a really powerful experience. When we go out into villages and do children’s festivals, we call them kids fest, where we play with the children, provide them with free food and popcorn, and games, this is one of the most important events because the children are those who go back home and they tell them “these people came and ministered to us, let’s go to church tonight”. It is powerful.

What does your ministry do? 

Ben: Mission Bulgaria has our Bulgaria side partners which are Dinko Zlatarov and Stefko Zlatarov, the ministries they’ve been doing here (Bulgaria) going on 20+ years. In the United States, Mission Bulgaria is advocating on behalf of Mission Bulgaria as well as coordinating the things that are happening there. Things we see happen on the ground here (Bulgaria) are food distribution, prayer, church planting, children’s festivals, medical procedures being offered, the elderly being cared for, education with the Esther Project, and much more. That is happening every day when there are teams on the ground and when there are no teams on the ground, when it’s just Stefko and Dinko or a team is on the ground. 

Dinko: When the teams are here we are empowered personally because when we don’t have you on the ground, it is very difficult for us financially to travel. So you provide us with the venue of going to places where we haven’t been before.

Why did you start doing ministry in Bulgaria?

Ben: You (Dinko) were back in Bible college in the United States, you came back here in 2008.

Dinko: Yeah, we came back in 2008 and we actually started working with the Roma people much earlier. The reason behind that was because, during communism, the Roma homes and the Roma little churches were safe places to go and have services. So our parents took us there and we felt very safe among them and they felt very loved. 

Ben: And that was very rare because Bulgarians and Romas didn’t go together. 

Dinko: My brother and I decided that we were going to go and venture among them and preach the Gospel. In the beginning, it was very weird on their side that Bulgarians were going there, but now they know us all over Bulgaria and we minister together. God is doing amazing things all over the places where we go and minister. 

Ben: We started partnering with Dinko and Stefko in 2010 shortly after Dinko had come back from the United States with good support and with lots of people loving and praying for them. Once we came, I learned that in 2009 we were seeing the Gospel spreading really fast in the country of Bulgaria, but there were very very few, meaning only a handful of people, ministering within the Roma villages. Dinko and Stefko were the pioneers within that space in this country and that’s why we began to partner with them because they cared for the “least of these” and the marginalized. 

Dinko: What Mission Bulgaria has done is with their help we have been able to expand what we have been doing in the past and they have boosted our ways of ministering to the Roma people, which has been really tremendous. 

Tell us about the Roma people and their spiritual needs

Ben: The Roma people for many years did not know much about their heritage, their history, or their identity. They were a people who migrated often and would travel from town to town and really didn’t have a written language, very little identity to them. Because of the difference within the racial divide, they found themselves again pushed to the margins of society within Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and even more so in Bulgaria. That has also led them to be very impoverished, because of the racial divide they couldn’t get jobs, and they couldn’t do lots of things. One of the stories we came here teaching early on, I did at least, was the story of the Good Samaritan because it is such a tough story to say to treat people well even when they mistreat you because they were experiencing so much of being mistreated. When we work within the Roma people, number one their spiritual need is to understand that there is a God who loves them, just like all of us, who knows them, and that God’s people love them as well even though they’ve experienced people who call themselves Christians hurting them in many ways, just like that Samaritans story. How can they change that cycle within their communities?

Dinko: Living in those conditions, and generation after generation, they got more and more impoverished. What we realized when we went there with the Gospel is a lot of these vicious cycles are being broken, the spiritual problem of witchcraft, early marriages, early sexual activities, a lot of gangs and a lot of criminal activity, family abuse, domestic abuse, drugs, alcohol, all there. But when we begin to infiltrate those places with the Word of God, we see real transformation, especially when we work with the children and they realize there is a better way, when they see that their child is being appreciated, that people really embrace them in a new society, in a place they’ve been hated before. This is where the breaking point is happening. 

Ben: And the reason for that is the word Gospel, which means the good news. The good news is good news from all bad situations.

Dinko: One of the things we forgot to mention is feeding. With the feeding station we have in Chirpan, we are feeding over 50 children on a regular basis. We’ve got a lot of these children around Bulgaria. We are trying to help as much as we can with what we have.